Was Norman Mailer’s Biography of Marilyn Monroe ‘A Labor of Lust’?

Norman Mailer wrote a full-page letter to the New York Times Book Review to protest the editor’s decision to assign his novel Harlot’s Ghost to the critic John Simon, Gail Pool recalls in Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri Press, 170 pp., $19.95, paperback). The novelist said that Simon wasn’t a fair choice partly because he had derided Mailer’s Marilyn: A Biography as “a labor of lust … a new genre called transcendental masturbation or metaphysical wet dreaming … a grisly roller-coaster ride along a biceps gone berserk.”